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Daniel de Kok writes "The NetBSD Foundation is proud to announce that it has registered the ``NetBSD®'' trademark. The foundation would like to thank Jay Michaelson (Wasabi Systems) for filing the application and providing answers to the US Patent Office, and Carl Oppedahl (Oppedahl & Larson) for giving advice and keeping the Foundation informed about the process. An official policy on the use of the NetBSD® trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon."

the NetBSD 'core' must have a lot of money if they can spend thousands on little things like trademarks (especially
ironical considering the BSD licence almost like public domain, you'd think these people wouldn't care about copyrights
and trademarks, etc).

Looking at the application:

Filing Date: 2000-09-12

That must have cost a fortune in lawyer fees. But then, if this is what it takes to further improve their already
great product (I run it on my IPAQ!), more power to them.

But the orignal post is quite right- in this case it must have cost a comparative fortune. Looking at the prosecution history, you can see two office actions and an appeal. I'm not sure "DIY" is even in the ballpark for non-lawyer IP professionals (let alone the average guy) in such circumstances.

There's some additional prosecution history here [uspto.gov] if you're curious. Gotta say, the approach to get around the objections based on registrations for BSD and FREEBSD (see the 11/26/02 doc) is pretty interesting, and certainly emphasizes that getting a NETBSD registration required a fair amount of work/resources.

Is NetBSD a registered non- or not-for- profit organization? If so, who is to say they didn't get some of the work pro-bono as a tax write off? Offer many hours free in exchange for repayment of real out of pocket expenses and write the rest off as donation to a non-profit.

Organizations like these have many friends in many places. Who is to say a spouse or friend of a NetBSD developer/PR person didn't write some of these documents in their spare time? Friend of mine traded some internet access and good social engineering for a few hours of lawyer time to draw up some TOS and 1year contracts for the wireless internet he was going to sell to his neighbors.

It's probably taken so long because they didn't want to spend a lot of money on lawyer fees. Cross the right palms with silver, and things happen amazingly quickly. Fail to do so, and they happen amazingly slowly.

I have filed my own paperwork on a couple of trademarks, and the total cost is less than $500. If I remember correctly, the cost of the final filing is about $350, which goes to pay an attorney employed at the patent and trademark office. If you are careful, and understand what can be trademarked, and what cannot, it is really rather easy.

Acquiring such a trademark means that it is somewhat easier to enforce that others do not use the trademark in their own product names.

$500 is hardly trivial, compared to the money they must be making. Nobody ever accused *BSD of being a money-spinner. It may be good, but it isn't there to make a profit.

Then, there's the risk-factor. What, really, is the risk of a competing *BSD distribution taking the name of "NetBSD"? Again, no insult intended, but it's not got the mindshare to be seriously at risk. It's not Rolls Royce, for example.

Finally, what could the money have been spent on, otherwise? $500 is a week's worth of documenting, or

...perhaps a big risk from other quarters with deep pockets who might think it cute to do so, and might do it through a daisy chian of proxies first to obfuscate who's behind it. Perhaps, pure speculation of course. I can think of a few places to whom 500 clams doesn't even qualify as pocket lint,but the idea of monkey wrenching in advance any ever potential future competitor might seem like making "good business sense", so maybe NetBSD being proactive before the fact of needing a trademark is a good thing

Then, there's the risk-factor. What, really, is the risk of a competing *BSD distribution taking the name of "NetBSD"?

Someone tried to steal the term "Linux" in 1994 or so, long before anyone heard of it or cared. You can bet it cost Torvolds a lot more money in lawyer fees to trademark a contested term than if he had registered first.

There's a lot of really important reasons to own a trademark. Without one, forgetting to renew a domain name could be a disaster. There's also hostile code forks, etc etc etc.

Look at FreeBSD -- it's trademarked, but the trademark is owned by a hostile company and not by FreeBSD. In theory, they could be required to change their name! The reputation cost would be a lot more than a thousand bucks.

Maybe you are a poor student and $1000 sound like a lot of money, but frankly if any of the NetBSD people have a real job, this isn't financially prohibitive.

I'm no poor student, and I've blown a few hundred dollars on an 18th century cookery book, because I felt like it.

There's a difference, though. The cookery book, I can use. Repeatedly. It also appreciates value with time, so given long enough I'll make the money back.

I don't see how NetBSD could ever reclaim the money spent, by merit of the name alone. Unlike antiques, NetBSD has no guarantee of increasing in value. Indeed, without something significantly special (eg: OpenBSD's promise of security out o

Most people can make $500 in a day (eg painting a house). Many people can make $500 in a few hours. And there are still a lot of people that can make $500 in less than an hour. Sure, it may pay a student to do something, but that is hardly an accurate depiction of time-is-money.

You must live in one of those socialist countries. I just paid a guy $400 a couple weeks ago to do less than one day's painting on my house. I can pretty much assure you he's not going to report, considering I paid him in cash.

thats cool but on the whole for most people 500 take home a day is a large amount of money. If you figure in taxes (~40% for this tax bracket) that means you have to make over 800 dollars a day which for a yearly salary would be ~192,000 (4 weeks vacation). Now your talking about a very very small percentage of the population.

What would be considered a typical cost to trademark a name? USPTO fee? Does one really need a lawyer? If something trademarked here, what is the cost to trademark it worldwide? Does one need to go to each countries trademark office or can one file with the WTO (world Trade Office) equivalent and do it all in one place?

1) Typical cost is $350 from the USPTO if you apply for it yourself (it's really not that hard: copyright and trademark protection is straightforward, unlike the patent process), and extra if you go through an attorney. Note: you need to use the trademark to protect it (i.e. you can just apply for a trademark to "hold on to it"). In most cases that's a given, since you're applying for the trademark to protect a good or service you're selling.

Saddino is right that there is no "do it all in one place" route for all countries. But on November 2, 2003, the US became part of a treaty [patents.com] called the Madrid Protocol which permits a single filing to extend to several dozen countries around the world. There is also something called a Community Trademark application which covers most of European Union in a single filing.

" how can you condem them before you even hear there policy on the use of the trademark?"

Its realy very easy, all it takes is a desire to hate somthing. Just like the Linux & Mac haters that have never used the platforms or the Windows haters that think its unchanged since the broken Windows 95 systems they last used.

Oh where, oh where is my BSD?
I just loaded it yesterday.
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see the OS when I leave this world.

I'd started to load it in my roommate's Dell,
the hard drive was taking it pretty well.
During the load, it crashed the heads,
the distro was stalled, *BSD was dead.
I couldn't stop, so I yanked the cord.
I'll never forget, the sound , oh Lord--
the screamin' drives, the speaker's blast,
the painful scream that I-- heard last.

Oh where, oh where is my *BSD?
That load took it away from me.
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see *BSD when I leave this world.

When I woke up, the sparks were pourin down.
There were admins standin all around.
Some fragments of chips gotten in my eyes,
but somehow I found my *BSD that night.
I lifted the CD, the devil winked and said,
"Load me darlin just a little while."
I held it close, I kissed the label--our last kiss.
I found the love that i knew i had missed
well now it's gone, even I loaded it right
I lost my *BSD and the Dell-- that night.

Oh where, oh where is my *BSD?
I tried to load it yesterday.
It's gone to heaven so I've got to be good,
So I can see *BSD when I leave this world.

Isn't that song a cover of something from the fifties? I believe I heard the original being played by some mexican dude at the flea market in santa cruz but he didn't speak enough english for us to communicate and for me to find out who did the original tune.

Witness the power of slashdot. Amidst the complaints of netbsd'ers spending too much money on something supposedly irrelevant, and the typical BSD is dying trolls, someone actually managed to learn something:D

> It protects them from somebody going out and writing an entirely new Operating System and selling it under the name NetBSD.

There are a number of benefits to registration: the team could prevent the use of NetBSD on _any_ distributions unless they authorise (e.g. such as a "NetBSD+custom distribution" would not be able to use the NetBSD mark).

It could be used with customs to prevent import of counterfeit "official" CD's, or even the use of NetBSD on unofficial release CD's.

For example, when a NetBSD release is generated, currently nothing stops anyone from building and releasing their own NetBSD distribution CD from the CVS tag. Now, the owners of the mark will be able to prevent this if they choose to.

I think Debian GNU/NetBSD says it all - Debian is the distributor, and we have a GNU userland atop NetBSD (analogous to GNU/Linux). I do realize that significant parts of NetBSD would have been wiped out, but, hey, it's open source, right?

As for trademark infringement, I suppose the NetBSD foundation would have to defend its mark in order to keep the rights, but they could grant Debian permission to use the mark, right?

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed and originally released under the NetBSD® trademark.

(excerpt from that site)Examples of Use Requiring A License.On the other hand, if you plan to market a product or offer a service to the public using a mark that identifies the LINUX based product under a name that you consider your product name, like "Super Dooper Linux" or "Real Time Linux Consultants" you are required to apply for and obtain the low cost one time royalty license described elsewhere on this web site. This is true whether you actually apply for a trademark for your product or service name, because you are using the mark in a trademark sense, and it is important that the public know that LINUX is the base mark owned by Linus, and that the derivative mark you have adopted is your particular version of Linux.

Beside our need to protect the Linux mark for all of us in the industry, this process allows us to prevent improper uses of the mark that might eventually result in someone obtaining a trademark with the word Linux in it that suggests that they are the sole source of Linux or the sole authority to certify some aspects of use or training concerning Linux. For this reason we have refused to license marks like "Linux University" or "The Linux Certification Board."(end-excerpt)

It's pretty reasonable for NetBSD to want the same protection from dillution for it's valuable brandname. And it's hardly the first open source OS to get it's name trademarked.

This article [newsforge.com] claims it was announced by Linux International a long time ago.

Also you can find posts by Jon Hall on usenet archives about it too.

If you read the LWI site you'd see "Website maintained courtesy of the law firm of Terra Law L.L.P. and AtreNet. Copyright 2000 Linux Mark Institute".. Obviously that Monterey address is for the maintainer of the website.

It is well known that Linus does not want to be involved in the trademark issues of Linux.